CIA Jim, yes

I want there to be a film with both Tim and Jim sitting at a desk pulling reaction faces to camera at everything going on.

One masquerading as the other

More likely it's a technical goof, somebody not folding the full English (and other language) subtitles into the streaming container.

Although I love it when they subtitle the inaudible-but-foreshadowing news anchor in the background.

SDH subtitles (subtitles for the deaf & hard of hearing) describe all the relevant sounds in a scene including background song lyrics, there is likely to be another plain subtitle track if you don't want that

If the song lyrics are relevant to the scene, sure I could see them being there. Like those songs that are custom written to do a sort of 4th wall breaking live commentary on the characters. But a lot of songs? Not needed at all.

I don't mind stuff like that when it's at the top of the screen like a fansub

I don't mind it as long as they do something like italics and little music notes or either end

Or there's no lyrics but the subtitles keep repeating "heat" or "scary".

Germany adds the funky police that sometimes only German subtitles are allowed no matter the audio language you pick. So if there are no German-language subtitles because none were ever made, well you're shit out of luck now, fuck you and your subtitle needs! 😐

Its really weird that they do that. Like I would have assumed that the hardcoded subs were part of the video.

I was watching rental family (an american guy moves to japan to be an actor and speaks a very little japanese) and somehow they decided to ignore all the parts in japanese and from the subtitles there was only the english parts. In the beginning i was like "ok, it's to let the audience know that the protagonist does not understand what they're shouting to him - then finally i had to pirate a sub from opensubtitles to understand was going on as the dialogues were 95% in japanese

My favorite is when services will put a caption like “[speaking spanish]” over top of the English subtitles that are in a film for a Spanish speaking character.

The film maker put the subtitles in there so if you can’t speak Spanish you can understand what the character is saying and then you can’t read it because Amazon decided to helpfully inform you they are speaking.

That’s called audio description, they do it for blind audiences.

My Dad is incredibly dyslexic, and it's a legit issue for him.

Growing up, if a movie or TV show had subs we had to take turns reading it out loud for him. I still have to catch myself trying to do automatically it when we're watching something with other people.

This made me curious how many words in ASL (and other sign languages) can be made just using the hand emojis. 🤔

Directions unclear, stealing third base

⬆️⬆️⬇️⬇️⬅️➡️⬅️➡️🅱️🅰️ [START]

I get a special kind of mad when I watch a foreign film in its original language. Turn on that language's subtitles and the subtitles don't match what's being verbally said because apparently the subs have been translated into English then back into the original language so nothing matches and everything sucks. Or worse when they've translated some idiom for American audiences and have translated that idiom back so what's being said makes zero sense.

Sometimes for fun I'll watch it foreign language movie I'll turn on English dubbing and run subtitles as well. It's really hilarious how different the two will be

Yeah I remember Man in the High Castle was really terrible with subtitles. It didn't have hard-coded subtitles at all and the programmatic ones didn't work reliably. So I'd be sitting there and and thinking "ok am I not supposed to know what they're saying?" After the scene goes on for a while it becomes "yeah I definitely supposed to know what they're saying well I guess I have to mess with subtitle settings." Sometimes it wouldn't work at all and I'd have to open a ticket with Amazon Prime and wait until they got it working.

So I guess they gave up on fixing subtitles and just baked them in. But still fucked it up anyway. Apparently a company as big as Amazon still can't do QA on the use case of someone who's an english speaker just watching on their platform. It's sad.

It happens on Jellyfin too but probably because the subs and videos are pulled from the same source

The only time a "[speaks German]" type of subs is acceptable is when the audience is not supposed to understand what's being said. Obscuring the hardcoded subs with that bullshit is absolutely infuriating.

Phrasing.

Screw them! Not like they can see what we type anyway!